Large Telescope Control-System

Sidereal Technology (Windows)

The Sidereal Technology Dual Servo Telescope Controller is economical, very small, and packed with may features. This telescope control system is installed on our large telescopes with Windows computers. It connects to 2 servo motors with integral encoders, and 2 telescope encoders. It will track and/or guide your telescope. You can use the SiTech controller with various software packages, even without computer as a stand alone solution.

Use the provided FREE ASCOM driver from Sidereal Technology. This requires a Windows OC. The advantage of using the ASCOM driver, is almost any planetarium program that supports ASCOM will accurately control your Alt/Az or Equatorial telescope. No special Virtual Serial Port drivers or NULL modem cables to otherwise unused serial ports. This ASCOM driver is very powerful, and supports almost every ASCOM Version 2.1 function.

The SiTech directly controls two servo motors with the motor position control loops running at nearly 2000 times a second, with high speed shaft encoders for position feedback on each motor.

In addition to the two encoders mounted on the motors, the SiTech unit can connect to two additional high speed encoders for the telescopes altitude and azimuth (or right ascension and declination). No need to add an additional "box" to connect shaft encoders. Open Collector RS232 Serial port for connecting 2 or more controllers on the same RS232 bus. Other controller axis's can be used as field de-rotators and/or focusers (Available using PC control only).

Connects to a wired handpad or optional radio handpad for slewing/panning/guiding. Signals from the wired or radio handpad work immediately, no delay as with some other systems, because the same micro-controller that is controlling the servo motors, "listens" to the handpad signals. No communication protocol delay. The Radio handpad protocol, is a lean and mean protocol, taking only the time to transfer 16 bits at a quick bit rate. There is absolutely no percieved delay between when you press a button on the handpad (radio or wired) and when the servo motors move. Can automatically track your telescope in the Equatorial mode, the DragNTrack mode, or the SlewNTrack mode without having a personal computer connected.

Full a full description of features please refer to the SiTech Website.

Remote Telescope System 2 (Linux)

RTS2, or Remote Telescope System, 2nd Version, is an integrated open source package for remote observatory control under the Linux operating system. Its goals is to create a system, which you will put on computer(s) running observatory, and it will keep it running, protecting it from elements, taking images, ensuring that pointing is good, reacting to TOOs, keeping track what was done, sending you data, and helping you to do science.

RTS2 is designed to run the observatory in fully autonomous mode, picking targets from a database table, storing image meta data to the database, processing images and storing their WCS coordinates in the database and offering Virtual-Observatory enabled access to them. It is currently running on various telescope setups world-wide. For control of devices from various manufacturers we developed an abstract device layer, enabling control of all possible combinations of mounts, CCDs, photometers, roof and cupola controllers.